The Sermons of Johannes Tauler · 32 of 124

First Sermon for Passion Sunday

He that Is of God heareth the words of God. — John vlii, 47.

I beg you, my dear children, to give me your close attention, and to turn your hearts and minds to this discourse, which will show you your present state of soul, and instruct you what to long for and what to strive after. Our Redeemer says: “He that is of God heareth the words of God. Therefore, you hear them not because you are not of God.” And then He added: “If any man keep My word, he shall not see death forever.”

Children, this is the time of year when we contemplate the holy passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let none of us now give himself up to rest, but rather let him open and read this holy book of Calvary, in which he will find all comfort and all truth, all knowledge and all gift of counsel. Be well assured that whosoever knows how to study the precious book of Christ’s passion, is rightly learned and understands all books whatsoever. And whosoever cannot do so walks in twilight. Let our rule and our pattern be the life and death of Jesus Christ, whom we are called on by God to follow. Therefore does St. Paul teach us in today’s epistle: “But Christ, being come an High Priest of the good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is, not of this creation; neither by the blood of goats, or of follow right after this our High Priest, as you were exhorted to do yesterday. Let us seek His honor alone in all things, and with all our own heart and mind.

Insight

Whoever knows how to study the book of Christ's passion is rightly learned, and whoever cannot walks in twilight. Tauler is making a sweeping claim about the order of knowledge: every other learning is secondary to this one reading. The instruction is the medieval discipline of passion meditation, in which the believer takes the wounds and abandonment of Christ as the central object of contemplation. Bonaventure's Lignum Vitae had codified the practice a century earlier as twelve fruits hanging from the cross-as-tree, each fruit a station for prayer. What Tauler adds is that this is not just one practice among many — it is the master practice, the book that explains the others.Bonaventure, Lignum Vitae; cf. Aelred of Rievaulx, On Jesus at Twelve; the Devotio Moderna's Imitation of Christ Book IV.

Our beloved Lord, our High Priest, has gone before us with both the - higher faculties and the lower ones of His nature. With the high powers of the Divine nature, to which He was united, He never ceased to regard the entire race of mankind and all their words, works and thoughts. He never lost sight of any one of the human beings made by His heavenly Father, and all the happenings of their lives, whether past, present or to come. He heard the word of God that 1 now speak to you. He saw all our faces here, looked into our deepest souls and saw all our thoughts and all our inclinations, with every one of the differences that characterizes us. And all this, even of the entire race, did He offer up to His Father, from Whom He had received it all, not excepting the very least thing; for in everything without exception He sought but the glory of His Father. Now, in this our Lord’s return to His Father of all that was His, His true friends should faithfully imitate Him. They should not make an exception of a single gift; no, not the very least; but they should give back to God for His glory alone, even though it may be a painful thing to do, everything whatsoever that is theirs, making no reservation at all.

The other way in which our High Priest has gone before us, is that of His inferior or human faculties. And this is the way of His practicing all virtues, especially that of suffering so bitterly for sins of which He was wholly guiltless, because He was determined to seek His Father’s glory. It was for this cause that He patiently bore the persecutions of the Pharisees — men who esteemed themselves righteous. So must all of Christ’s followers suffer pain, especially those who have sworn and vowed to seek Him and serve Him, suffering, as they must, from the persecution of those who have fallen away from Him. The followers of Christ seek after nothing, keep nothing in view in their conduct, but God. They do not confine themselves to particular ways of serving Him, but in every way that is God’s, and always as He guides them do they go forward, making no choice for themselves. It is for this reason that they must suffer from those who seek themselves, and will hear of no way of serving God except their own chosen way. These do not understand men who, not in any particular or favorite way, but in any way and in all ways whatsoever serve God.

Notice that our Lord said: ‘‘He that is of God heareth the Word of God.” St. Gregory comments on this in a lesson of this day’s matins, bidding every one of us search his conscience as to where he stands and to whom he belongs, and whether or not he hears God’s Word with the hearing of the heart. God commands us to cherish thoughts of our heavenly fatherland, and to banish the concupiscence of the flesh, and to shun the honors of this world. Hence, insists St. Gregory, each one should examine whether it is his heart that hears and heeds the Word of God; for, he says, there are some whose lives are so unworthy, that they are incapable of interiorly understanding God’s word, and are hardly able to listen to it with their bodily ears.

God spoke two words for men’s hearing: First, the heavenly Father spoke His eternal Word in the Godhead itself. How closely the human soul is related to that Word in that life of the soul which extends beyond space and time, no human understanding can grasp. The soul of man is exceedingly close to God and kindred to Him in the soul’s deepest depths, hidden in that inner and Divine stillness. There it is that the heavenly Father utters His Word, a hundred times quicker than the twinkling of an eye. There that Word is understood, more plainly or less, in proportion as the interior ear of the soul is turned more or less intently to listen, in proportion as the soul abides in greater or less interior quiet and union of spirit with the Word.

But however deeply hidden in the soul that Word may be, it yet rises and spreads upward and outward into those powers of the soul that are above the imagination; that is to say, into the will and the understanding. Therefore might God say that His Word was not His, but ours as well as His. Now, when the will is made aware of the Word within the soul, it quickly starts up, but does not know what it has heard. And then it exclaims: I do not know what I should do, or whether I should do anything. But the understanding now comes to the aid of the will, for it also has heard the Word, and it says to the will: Follow me carefully, for I can teach thee and guide thee. And the understanding forthwith teaches the will what to do and what not to do. And then the Word is sounded within, deeper and farther; namely, into the soul’s power of desire, teaching the soul detachment from all created things that can hinder God’s work in it; teaching temperance in the use of all things innocent; not in restraint of nature’s real necessities, but of superfluities. And then the Word is heard in what philosophers call the soul’s irascible faculty, the faculty by which transform thee into what God would have thee. Search thy soul diligently as to what effect God’s Word has had on thee, first in thy innermost soul, and then in its different powers. This will be a sign to thee as to whether thou art of God or not, as truth itself has spoken: “He that is of God heareth the Words of God. Therefore, you hear them not because you are not of God.”

Insight

The Word is uttered in the soul's deepest depth, hundred times faster than the twinkling of an eye, and the soul understands it more or less according to how quietly the inner ear is turned. This is one of the densest passages of Tauler's metaphysics. The Father's eternal speaking of the Word is also the speaking of every rational creature into being, which means your existence is a syllable in an utterance still going on. The Grund of your soul is where you can hear what is being said. The interior silence is not therapeutic; it is acoustic. The Cloud of Unknowing makes the same point in English: the work of contemplation is to clear the noise and let the speech reach you.John 1:1-4; Cloud of Unknowing ch 3-7; cf. Eckhart Pr 9 on the eternal Word being spoken in the soul's ground.

How shall one continue in this Word, that he may always hear it and understand it? The first way is found in the interior of the soul, where it hears the Word in a state raised above time and space. Does the soul there obey the Word with inward detachment of spirit? That is the question. Those noble souls whose external life has been well trained in devout practices, never, as long as body and soul hang together, consider themselves well enough advanced in virtue. Such a one the moment he hears the Word spoken within him, must draw in to his interior consciousness all his exterior faculties, and, soaring above space and time, he must direct his gaze into eternity. Thus says St. Augustine: “When a man’s interior spirit is turned toward eternity, forthwith he has nothing to do with time.” Even the active life and that of the senses, to such chosen spirits as these, is almost wholly raised above this temporal existence, and it is only those who have arrived at this state, who hear the Word and receive it in their interior souls. As to the others, they hear the Word in their less spiritual, that is to say, their inferior faculties. Their response is given by a service of mortification and suffering, totally submissive to God’s visitations and good pleasure. Yet be cautious; be not imprudent; thou are not allowed to overburden thyself. But yet bend thy back obediently under all afflictions coming from God, whether direct or through men, suffering with all willingness, as under His chastening hand. Carry all burdens back again to Him. Lay every sorrow at His feet with unfeigned gratitude. Our High Priest has not entered in without the shedding of blood; He shed His blood for us; nay, He poured it all out most generously; and there are four ways in which we can shed our blood for Him.

The first is by true penitential works, both of the spirit and of the flesh. When a man has departed from God by his disorderly pleasures and his indulgence in this world’s joys, he must turn back and away from such things and wean himself from them, turning now to God;

The second bloodshedding is in the outward senses; for these are so tamed by penance, that their disorderly use dies out of a man, and pleasure in such things as are heard or seen quite ceases; a man then readily constrains himself to look and listen for inward joys alone. Part of this bloodshedding, is in the persecution God’s friends suffer from those who live without taking God into account, and who pierce them through and through with their ill-treatment. This affliction, if they cannot escape it, they must suffer with all mildness. And now a question is asked by strong-souled men, at once pious and bold, but overeager in their own opinion: Should we avoid, should we endeavor to escape, any suffering that overtakes us? As to themselves, they never do so, for they are not rightly guided and do not know from what and when to fly, for their souls are full of impressions which have entered in from the outward world. But the true friend of God knows well what trials to fly from and how long to avoid them. For example: As often as my presence wounds my neighbor’s sensibilities rather than helps to sanctify him, then I must leave him. How bright an example have we in our beloved Lord, as we have several times read in the lessons of this week, as He repeatedly fled from among the Jews and hid Himself!

The third bloodshedding is a great one. It is that God’s friends must stand by and behold their God, whom they love better than life itself, grossly dishonored by His creatures, the very souls whom He purchased at so dear a price. Sometimes it seems to them — O, what agony! — that the whole world cares nothing for God or ever thinks of Him, not only laymen, but sometimes even clergymen dishonoring Him. This is a two-edged sword, and it cuts through their very heart and soul. They love their neighbor most sincerely, and literally as deeply as they love themselves, and here they behold them doing themselves deadly injury and caring very little about it. One longs to cry out: If thou art baptized a thousand times, and if thou wearest a hundred different religious garbs, it all avails thee nothing if thou dost those things that are not

And it is a fortunate thing that so many of God’s friends are not father confessors, for their hearts would be broken with the knowledge of this misery.

Context

Tauler's four bloodsheddings — penance, the taming of the outward senses, sorrow at God's dishonor by creatures, and the soul's absorption into God — function in this sermon the way the classical Four Ways of Contemplating the Passion (historical, exemplary, mystical, fruition) function in the wider Rhineland tradition. The first two are ascetical, the third is empathetic-mystical, the fourth is unitive. Each stage is a deeper share in the actual blood of Christ. Ignatius of Loyola would two centuries later structure the Second Week of his Spiritual Exercises around a related progression — moving the meditator from imagined scene to felt participation to interior transformation.Tauler's four-fold scheme parallels Bonaventure's three modes of passion meditation; cf. Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises, Second Week meditations on the public life of Christ.

The fourth bloodshedding is very delightful. It happens when God, the Supreme and Blessed Good, takes possession of the soul in its innermost being, withdrawing it from its own self and from all created things and fixing it in Himself most blissfully. Then does a man at last behold the infinite and most sweet Good that God is, that no created being can fully comprehend. Then does he know that all the praise and love that is due to the saincs and angels, is as nothing compared to the glory that is due to the Being that is now present to his soul. Ah, when the spirit of a man thus learns the superessential infinity of God, how utterly sinks away out of his sight the pettiness of self and of all creatures! Now, at last, he is able to say: I hold back nothing from God. The soul stripped of everything that is not God, is immersed in the abyss of the Godhead; self-existence is lost and gone, as it were, and the soul dwells in God alone, and God, in turn, loves and praises the soul and has His delight in it. This bloodshedding, — is it not, indeed, delightful when the creature is thus immersed in God the Creator? That we may all attain to this happy end, may our good God grant us. Amen.

is in itself a grade of perfection — Contentment with present spiritual conditions is apt to be sinful — Unrest is often a sign of vigorous spiritual health.